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Slashback: Ascent, Patents, Transferability
Your ruse, your clever trick. On August 22nd, we reported that OpenOffice.org's OS X version had been delayed for two years.
However, bluethundr writes "Hold the phone! Is it delayed or isn't it? Well, according to this story in the register, it AIN'T DELAYED...just undermanned. Apparently there are only TWO (count 'em! one...aw heck, where was I?) developers working on the OS X development team. Dan Williams (who is one of the two in question) says that 'the Mac version is in a Catch-22: with only two developers, it desperately needs man power. But no one will join the porting effort until they see momentum behind the Aqua port.' Maybe some of the coders among us could lend them a hand?"
Too late for the colonies, help save the mothership. leif.singer writes "While there still is some time left, please consider signing Eurolinux' petition against software patents in Europe." You'll be in good company: vinsci writes "In their news section, FFII has posted a more detailed story: "Within a few days, the petition calling the European Parliament to reject software patentability accumulated 50,000 new signatures.""
Free as in FreeDOS Jim Hall writes "I thought I'd submit this before the news item fell too far down our web page. If you remember about a year ago, Dell was to offer Windows-less PC's, instead pre-installing FreeDOS. You can now order a Dell with FreeDOS (or Linux) ... and have been for a while now. They are pretty nice machines, too (3.06GHz). We have the news item (with links to Dell) at the FreeDOS Project web site."
Nasty worms ought to at least produce spice. The NRC released an alert about worm infections and nuclear power plants. This is a reaction after the SQL-Slammer attacked the shut-down Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January.
Tomorrow is another year. RoadKillian writes "New Scientist reports thats the QinetiQ 1, the record-breaking balloon which was supposed to rise to an altitude of 40km (131,000ft) has ripped during inflation. The weather is unlikely to permit another attempt this year."
When EULAs collide. Yesterday's story about selling a song downloaded from iTunes seems to have an unhappy ending: sideswipe76 writes "As I was watching this auction today, it approached $16,600! Now, if you try and check this link from eBay you get 'invalid item.' Is eBay wussing out just to avoid any legal snafus that _might_ occur? Or did he violate some ebay policy? Thoughts?"
..I think right now I'd rather have a window without PC's..
air and light and time and space
According to News.com, the reason they scrubbed the iTunes auction was because he violated one of eBay's rules, which states that "eBay prohibits the listing of items or products to be delivered electronically through the Internet", aka the "You can't sell it if it doesn't physically exist" policy. Such as transfer may still be legal, but it looks like eBay isn't the place to do it.
Come on now- what possible use is there for this?
It sounds about as useful to me as that ~4.xxMB Win95 distribution...
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
This may just be a crazy theory, but maybe the RIAA "told" eBay to close the auction. After all, if the auction had gone through and people were allowed to resell songs (as long as they gave up their own -only- copy) then the RIAA would have a new set of legal arguments on hand.
The fact that the auction has been pulled should convince anyone who has wondered that DRM is the only way for companies to profitably sell music on the internet.
Incidentally, it is also a testament to the likely success of Microsoft's upcoming music download service, where you pay an annual fee and may download any 60 songs for playback on a handful of certified devices that are digitally tied to your account. If you get tired of some of the songs, you can turn them in and exchange them for new ones.
When you think about it, this plan makes a lot of sense, since it ushers in the new era of portable digital storage, which you can plug into your car, your expensive Harmon Karden system, or your walkman. It also makes sense in that it will probably make record companies more money than they make today, while making consumers happier.
Wouldn't you like to pay $120 per year and be able to "rent" any 60 songs at any time for as long as you want???
Right now, you could buy 8 or 9 CDs, or 120 iTunes songs, which for most people wouldn't be enough to really establish a satisfactory music library.
I know this post sounds pro-Microsoft, but it's actually pro-capitalism and pro-innovation. Capitalism works so well because it always encourages companies to come up with a better mousetrap, or in this case a better music distribution system.
Amazing magic tricks
This thread addresses the part of eBay's policy that has probably been violated.
Of course, who's to say eBay didn't just roll over under the pressure? Wouldn't be the first time.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
Just a thought, but I have a feeling that when bidding gets to the thousands of dollars for something worth virtually nothing, Ebay starts to get a little weary.
I know that I once had the great experience of falling for a new TiBook 1GHZ for only $1500. Bidding went well above that, and Ebay then pulled. Turned out it actually was a scam.
My guess is that Ebay would happily risk stopping a real auction for the small chance it might be a hoax(instead of vica versa). In this case on the chance the bidders won't back their wagers.
tilTrue.info contechtext.info prettypowerful.info twitter.com/frets fb.com/prosody
eBay policy
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
on their Downloadable Media Policy page?
Or was that secretly added after this song was listed?
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
/joeyo
2^5
Quote:
"Within a few days, the petition calling the European Parliament to reject software patentability accumulated 50,000 new signatures."
Radical New Petition Method: Get everyone who signs to send one dollar. Fight Money with Money! $50,000+ should be able to buy a polititian, right?
The longer I'm a member of the Human Race, the more I believe Apocalypse is a valid solution.
Anyone brave enough to question the distilled coolade that is Apple and anything they touch since coming out with OSX ("ooh, ooh, pretty and Unix, ooh, OOH, AAaahhhh..") might find this spoof of iTunes to be an amuzing antidote.
One of the national news broadcasts just had a couple people talking about 'computer problems' as a factor in the East Coast blackout. A transcript of the first few minutes of the outage had technicians complaining that their computers were acting strangely and that they couldn't diagnose the problem because of that.
The CEO of the company that had the 'original' problem asserted that there must have been systems failures at other sites in order to bring down the entire grid. He said his company alone could not have caused the problems that occurred.
I wonder if any of the MS worms that were circulating at the time actually were to blame for the outage as has been speculated here before?
The webcast of the hearing will be available here when it's ready.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
And if I have to keep paying rent instead of a flat fee, I'll go patronize artists who don't expect lifetime tenure or get huffy when I ask them "So what have you written lately?"
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
For,
The bids that the guy was getting for his ITunes song, Double Dutch something or nother, should make the RIAA seriously consider selling all of their music on EBAY.
Heck, I'm thinking about recording a tune or two for that sorta money.
Caution: Contents under pressure
I wish to inform you that I wrote the Malloc routine for FreeDOS.
Please send me $299 for each installed copy of FreeDOS you have on your PCs..
Darl McBride
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
A friendly reminder about it's and its:
itsits.gif (safe for work)
Laugh at my Lisp and I keeell you.
-----Chaz
E-bay is a nice place for the exposure if you can't get it anywhere else and don't mind the fees, but what's stopping him from firing up a site and taking bids via e-mail? He's certainly got plenty of attention.
Considering a 99 million dollar bid was placed it'd also be handy to list all the bids placed allowing people to bid in between in case higher bids fall through. It was also aliviate false inflation.
No point in putting in a fake high bid if anyone can bid lower.
It would then also be possible to contact the losing bidders at the end and ask them to donate their bid to the EFF or whatever even though they won't get a crappy song for it.
Using e-bay doesn't test the legality of anything relevant. It simply tests E-Bay's TOS. Selling it himself would test the legality of selling the iTune.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
He said the music was to be donated to the EFF. I suspect the people participating in the auction knew full well the track wasn't "worth" anything at all. It's "worth" was in this auction's value as a test case, and that $16,000 would, no doubt, be well used defending this sale (should it have passed) in court.
Seems like soneone saw the first auction and posted another iTunes auction. the experiment continues.
eBay item=2555862144
OpenOffice already runs on OS X. What they are talking about is a Quartz/Aqua port. But, frankly, why bother? Even if people use Quartz/Aqua APIs, OpenOffice still won't look or behave exactly like a Cocoa-native application, so it really won't be any more "native" than the existing X11 port. Furthermore, Apple's X11 server for OS X is just fine for running software like OpenOffice, it's free, and it's easy to install.
.NET, Gtk+, wxWindows, and FLTK applications to it. OpenOffice on X11 is just another toolkit. What people could spend time more profitably on is cleaning up the few remaining glitches in the integration of X11 with the OS X desktop. Most of those can be done fairly easily, but Apple might consider adding a small X11 extension that would allow people to add OS X-specific features to their X11 applications without a complete rewrite.
There probably isn't much interest in the Quartz/Aqua port because there doesn't seem to be much point to it: it's a lot of work and won't behave much differently.
As OS X becomes more mainstream, the "purity" of its user interface (if you can call the mix of Cocoa and Carbon "pure") will increasingly go away: people will port MFC, Swing,
From Dell I can get FreeDOS, but how do I get Free Dell?
http://www.kubuntu.org/
According to Tech Bargains You can get a DELL 400SC 2GHz server without an OS for $299. (3.2GHz just $622)
Not too hard to imagine a cluster of these.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
The FreeDos website has links to the Dell 360 desktop. The interesting thing I found, was that the default configuration with Windows (any version) selected as the OS costs $2863. The exact same options with Red Hat or Free DOS is only $2234.
Yes, that's right. Dell is rooking $629 for Windows. If that doesn't piss you off enough, read this.
However, I do have to say that I am glad there are now 2 major hardware vendors selling desktop systems with Linux as the only OS. IMHO, this is the only thing that IBM needs to do to solidify their commitment to Linux. I love what they're doing with Linux servers, but I sure wish I could buy a Thinkpad with a hardware modem and Linux.
The investigation also found plant computer engineering personnel were unaware of a security patch that prevented the worm from working.
Now I hate to deride any of my fellow IT workers but does Davis-Besse employ trained monkeys to run their network? Seriously. In addition to being plastered all over Slashdot and every IT news site in the known universe, it was covered extensively on all the major news networks. That's incompetence folks, plain and simple.
News like this (not to mention the actions of SCO, the RIAA/MPAA keiretsu, and the degredation of freedom in the US through the DMCA, PATRIOT I/II acts, et al.) makes me want to move to the most remote tropical island in the world and set up a benevolent technocracy. Who's with me? :-)
DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! You're a hair's breadth beneath the troll threshold on this one.
... DRM has absolutely nothing to do with rights. It should really be called "DPM", for Digital Profit Management, since that's all it is. If this kind of thing becomes widespread "rights" will go right out the window. Who do you believe is best qualified to manage your data: you, or the RIAA? Perhaps you would feel more comfortable with Microsoft pulling your strings. If you choose anyone but yourself, you are giving up control in order to provide someone else with security. That's a defective bargain, my friend, and you would be a fool to make it.
... that's just too bad. Let them gracefully fade into the background noise of history with the rest of the big green lizards, while those of us who walk upright on two legs will use our expanded cranial capacity to enjoy whatever takes their place. This is evolution in action, folks: enjoy the show.
---
Where is it written that any organization or business should be guaranteed an unending flow of green? That attitude is about as anti-capitalistic, anti-consumer, anti-innovation and for that matter anti-competitive as I can imagine, and I can imagine quite a lot. Business is supposed to respond to the dictates of the marketplace, not the other way around! And the reason that businesses listen to the market is because of competition: if you aren't keeping your customers happy, why, someone else will. And probably for less money.
Conversely, if you give your customers what they want for a price they are willing and able to pay, they will take care of you. The genius of good business is in finding ways to keep customers happy while still turning a profit. The music industry has not, for nearly thirty years, concerned itself with improving quality or pricing. As a matter of fact, they have given us music that is of poorer quality and lesser variety than ever before, and charge us more for it. And the only way they've been able to get away with that is because they are a monopoly (quite possibly of the illegal kind) and they will do anything to maintain that status.
We already have a perfectly functional music distribution system. It's called "The Internet" and "MP3". I simply will not relinquish control of computer equipment and software that I own in order to provide corporations that I don't like, and won't support, a guaranteed revenue stream. "Rights" my left big toe
By way of comparison, the software industry learned to deal with illegal copying of its "intellectual property" years ago and in spite of "rampant piracy" has still managed to innovate and turn handsome profits. In fact, those companies that eliminated heavy-handed copy-protection and activation schemes are often among the most successful because they put the customer first!
So just who are these people, that they believe they are some kind of national treasure that must be preserved at all costs? If the RIAA and all of its member companies disappeared from the face of earth tomorrow, the music would still go on. And, we would enjoy it all the more since our tastes wouldn't be dictated by a bunch of Pointy Haired Music Executives who may perform market surveys but obviously don't listen to them. Hell, some of us might even learn to (*gasp*) make our own music! Keyboards anyone? Sax?
But more to the point, if these Luddites can't handle the pace and nature of progress and advancing technology
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.